Go is a programming language created by Google in 2012 that has gained popularity for building scalable and performant backend systems. Many large tech companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Dropbox use Go for services and APIs. Companies report benefits of using Go including improved productivity for engineers, faster deployment times, ability to easily scale to many engineers, and improved performance for handling high traffic and loads.

1. TechTalk #3
What do people say
when they switch to Go?
Vũ Nguyễn
vu.nguyen@will.vn

2. Go is an optional language released in 2012
( It does not force you to use it like
Java for Android or Obj-C for iOS )
Why is it popular today?

3. 03/2015 04/2016

4. Who are using Go?
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Mozilla,
Yahoo, eBay, GitHub, Twitter, Dropbox, Docker,
MongoDB, Couchbase, Disqus, Basecamp,
CoreOS, CloudFlare, …
https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUsers

5. Google has big softwares and big problems.
https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
2012

6. The hardware is big and the software is big.
There are many millions of lines of software,
with servers mostly in C++ and lots of Java and Python
for the other pieces.
Thousands of engineers work on the code, at the "head"
of a single tree comprising all the software.
https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
2012

7. The goals of the Go project were to eliminate the slowness and
clumsiness of software development at Google,
and thereby to make the process more productive and scalable.
The language was designed by and for people who write—and
read and debug and maintain—large software systems.
https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
2012

8. 2011 We started with Ruby on Rails, quickly build first version.
At the end of 2012, we had 200 API servers which serve 3000
requests per second for 60,000 mobile apps.
When our API traffic started growing faster, we started having
to rapidly spin up more database machines.
The “one process per request” started to fall apart.
http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/
2015

9. After rewriting the EventMachine push backend to Go we went
from 250k connections per node to 1.5 million connections per
node.
The time it takes to run our full integration test suite
dropped from 25 minutes to 2 minutes.
The time to do a full API server deploy with rolling restarts
dropped from 30 minutes to 3 minutes.
http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/
2015

10. “The hardest part of the rewrite was dealing with
all the undocumented behaviors and magical
mystery bits that you get with Rails middleware.”
http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/
2015

11. “We love Go. We've found it really fast to deploy,
really easy to instrument, really lightweight and
inexpensive in terms of resources.”
http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-saved-our-sanity/
2015

12. We need to scale a company
from the early days of 5 engineers
to 200+ engineers as the business grows.
http://jimplush.com/talk/2015/12/19/moving-a-team-from-scala-to-golang/
2015

13. [Scala at Gravity]
Several of us started investigating and were able to track the
source of the issue.
The only problem was we had no idea what the code was doing
at first.
We came across a strange symbol we hadn’t seen in our
projects before. The spaceship operator <|*|> . Someone said
out loud “what the hell is that?”.
http://jimplush.com/talk/2015/12/19/moving-a-team-from-scala-to-golang/
2015

14. http://jimplush.com/talk/2015/12/19/moving-a-team-from-scala-to-golang/
2015

15. While you can have very high performing small teams going
with Scala, trying to grow and engineering organization > 50 is
an uphill battle.
One of Go’s reasons for existence is to make developers more
productive. […] New developers we’ve hired are ramped up in
weeks vs months.
http://jimplush.com/talk/2015/12/19/moving-a-team-from-scala-to-golang/
2015

16. “Wow, I read through that [Go] library once and I knew exactly
what it was doing,
I’ve read the Scala version of that library four times and I still
have no idea what it does,
I can see why you guys like it so much”
http://jimplush.com/talk/2015/12/19/moving-a-team-from-scala-to-golang/
2015

17. About a year ago, we decided to migrate our performance-
critical backends from Python to Go to leverage better
concurrency support and faster execution speed.
This was a massive effort–around 200,000 lines of Go code–
undertaken by a small team of engineers. At this point, we have
successfully moved major parts of our infrastructure to Go.
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2014/07/open-sourcing-our-go-libraries/
2014

18. Go's library is extensive and easy to work with.
Go generates a single executable that can be
distributed to our clients. There's no complex
dependency chain or layout of shared libraries to
worry about.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-cloudflare/
2012

19. 1. Static compilation
2. It’s not C++, not Python, not Ruby, not Java
3. It’s has good async, low-level interface,
extensive library
4. “go doc”, “go get”, “go fmt”, “go test”, “go run”
5. Multi-arch build
http://www.slideshare.net/jpetazzo/docker-and-go-why-did-we-decide-to-write-docker-in-go
2013

20. “Go feels perfect for Ops work.
The error handling seems to fit so naturally into the way I want
to write systems software.
Deployment is really simple too, where I’d have to think about
how to package up deps and configure Ruby versions I can now
just push an updated binary.”
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3897-go-at-basecamp
2015

21. When we launched the CoreOS project we knew from the very
beginning that everything we built would be written in Go.
This was not to make a fashion statement, but rather Go
happened to be the perfect platform for reaching our goals – to
build products that make distributed computing as easy as
installing a Linux distro.
https://blog.gopheracademy.com/birthday-bash-2014/go-at-coreos/
2014

22. Go is amazingly stable and awesome.
I can't begin to list why everything about it is just great.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Koding-switch-from-Node-js-to-Go
2012

23. TechTalk #3
Thank you
Vũ Nguyễn
vu.nguyen@will.vn